In his excellent new article on Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor's 1965 television appearance on Jazz: The Experimenters, Ethan Iverson states: "Those eager to condemn Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton Marsalis as hopelessly conservative may want to stop and learn more about what they were trying to conserve."
I don't have any problem with what they were trying to conserve; I love the music they champion. What I take exception to is not what they were trying to conserve, but that they chose to do it at the expense of the music of iconoclasts like Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and late Miles Davis. "Jazz," as problematic as the term is, is nothing if not inclusive. So, yeah, I guess I'm eager to condemn Marsalis and Crouch for their lack of tolerance. Yeah, I am intolerant of their intolerance.
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